The Gratitude Attitude

The end of November is upon us and that moves us to gather with friends and family to celebrate Thanksgiving. An amazing feast with our families and friends is just one of the tangible benefits of the Thanksgiving holiday. However, don’t overlook some of the intangible benefits we enjoy when we celebrate with an overall mindset of gratitude.

Be grateful for what you have.

Recent studies have established that when people take time to identify specific positive attributes in others or their actions, and take time to record them in some way, they tend to:

• Have a relative absence of stress and depression
• Make progress toward important personal goals
• Report higher levels of determination and energy

Using imapMyTeam® makes it easy to find and document positive attributes of your team and other co-workers.

Take a few minutes to read about what your colleagues contribute to the team by running their “Things You Contribute to the Organization” report. Just login to imapmyteam.com click on their name to move them to the center pane and select that report to view it. Consider their contributions and how they add to the team’s overall success. Perhaps write down a few notes to solidify your appreciation.

We hope you enjoy some time away from the demands of work and your return from the holiday comes with a renewed attitude of gratitude!

Happy Thanksgiving to all! 

Relationships Make You Smarter!

Recently Fast Company ran an article that listed ‘Five Surprising Science-Backed Things That Make You Smarter’. One item on the list caught our eye; it was about how relationships make you smarter. The science behind this is called transactive memory systems.

In short a transactive memory system consists of the knowledge stored in each individual's memory combined with information regarding their different teammate's areas of expertise.

A transactive memory system provides teammates with information regarding the knowledge they have access to within the group. Group members learn who knowledge experts are and how to access their expertise through communicative processes. In this way, a transactive memory system can provide the group members with more (broader) and better knowledge than any individual could access on his own.

The important lesson to be learned and applied? People with diverse connections have better ideas than people with homogenous connections.

In imapMyTeam.com you have the MY TEAMS section to make sure you are leveraging the diverse transactive memory system at your disposal. Your team, as structured in the organizational chart is automatically built into the system. However you can create any number of teams by using the create teams or even the “my meetings” functions to build diverse groups for the purpose of problem solving.

It ought to be a ‘red flag’ to you when any of the four quadrants are empty. In those cases you are missing a critical piece of your transactive system and may be failing to fully leverage the diversity at your disposal.

Get diverse and get smarter today. 

Get Personal

“It’s not personal; it’s just business.”

Heard that phrase lately [Other than from watching any of the movies in the Godfather Trilogy]? Yes you have. Maybe even used it yourself once or twice.

Great leaders understand nothing is more personal than leadership, and they engage accordingly. The best leaders understand a failure to engage is in fact a failure to lead. Average leaders remain aloof and distant – great leaders look to know, understand and care for their people.

That realization shows up in many ways. We are often reminded that there is no “I” in team, and that all great achievements come at the hands of people working together. We read company value statements that say something to the effect of, “People are our greatest asset.” That IS a personal approach.

www.imapMyTeam is your link to quick insight on how to “know, understand and care” for other people. Here are a few of the many imapMyTeam reports that will help you engage others more effectively:

• How to talk to him/her
• What to avoid with him/him
• How to Best Use Interests

Peak performance is never built on the backs of others; but by helping others become successful. Treat your people as if your career depends on it – after all- business is personal. 

imapMyTeam’s New Home Page is Here!

Effective Friday November 22^nd there will be several changes to the site when you open http://www.imapmyteam.com in your browser. You’ll notice a new look right away and see we are expanding the usefulness of the imapMyTeam landing page.

Since the inception of imapMyTeam, the main page has served a single purpose; for users to login to their personal and team information.

That has not changed; you will still login from this page. However, the location of the login has moved to the upper right hand corner of the screen and is clearly marked:

USER Login

Click on the User Login button and enter your username and password as you always have to access your personal home page. 

Thank you for being an imapMyTeam User.

S-T-R-E-T-C-H your comfort zone

It is very easy to fall into a pattern of treating every person and situation similarly based on our own set of strengths. Because our strengths serve us well so often, we undertake the next ‘thing’ with the same approach. Sometimes this works fabulously, sometime it falls short.

Are you self-aware enough to fairly evaluate the times your strengths fell short?

The willingness to allow your positions and opinions to be challenged is a sign of strength, not weakness. People who are never willing to change their mind/position/skills ensure only one outcome – a lack of growth and development.

We once worked with a president of a healthcare company who exhorted his senior team to be “more comfortable being uncomfortable”. While this is not easy to hear and takes practice to master, he was on to an important insight. He understood that everyone -not just the senior leaders he was managing - needs to be willing to look inside, to learn who they are, so they can better manage [stretch] themselves.

www.imapMyTeam.com is a tool that will help you gain the self-awareness you need to move beyond the behaviors of your comfort zone. You will find helpful insights necessary to expand your existing comfort zone and discover new behaviors leading to a new zone of effectiveness.

When you learn to intentionally change your usual approach in the best interest of the team or the task at hand you’ll find your comfort zone expanding. You’ll also put yourself and your team one step closer to success.

Coaching Matters - A 40% Improvement

Coaching to Win: The World Series is in full swing [this is not a ‘sports’ post; non-sports fans stay with us] and one of the teams competing for the championship is the Boston Red Sox. Last year the Red Sox won just 69 of 162 games. This season, after a change in their field manager, whose primary responsibility is to get the most out of each of his players, the Sox won 97 games. That is a whopping 28 game improvement; 40% more wins than last year!

In addition to the field manager’s role of inspiring best performance, it’s also critical for the players themselves to be leaders in the clubhouse (locker-room) and on the field. When players make great plays on the field, it fuels momentum on the team. It’s exciting to be a part of a team with winning momentum and everyone’s performance seems to improve.

This is also true in business. When everyone on the team, managers and team players alike, take responsibility for coaching and inspiring others, it creates a winning business atmosphere. When everyone in the organization has a good idea about what they and others need to be successful, it’s a lot easier to coach, inspire and achieve world class performance.

ImapMyTeam.com is filled with resources to assist you in gaining insight into what your team needs to perform at its very best. Mangers will find the “Coaching” and the “How to Inspire for Best Performance” reports when clicking on the icon next to their direct reports. Team players will find the “Coaching” reports for their teammates in the “My Teams” window and clicking on “My Peers”.

Commit to be an inspiration to others, and improve your team’s performance today! 

Build Authentic Relationships

Essential Cultivation Tools: Rakes, Hoes, Plows and imapMyTeam

Today, more than ever, achieving success in business requires collaboration and the ability to achieve not only personal goals, but ones held in common.  Establishing authentic relationships at work is a key ingredient to encouraging others to willingly collaborate in good times and perhaps more importantly when there’s much at stake and the going gets tough.

Before you can set out to build effective, authentic relationships with others, it’s important to have an accurate and authentic picture of yourself. Having an accurate and authentic understanding of yourself is powerful in that it gives you the ability to choose how you will behave towards or respond to others. It gives you the power to manage yourself; in the best interests of important relationships or the best interest of the project. 

Virtually all of the reports in imapMyTeam.com® will help you understand yourself [and others] better. Reading your own reports and reports about others is incredibly useful. Yet there is one additional step that you may not be taking full advantage of; a conversation.

The imapMyTeam.com® reports are also designed to be conversational.  If you work with someone quite a bit, take a couple of minutes over a cup of coffee, or lunch – whenever you can carve out the time- to print the reports and talk about them. Share your thoughts, expand on the language. Capture important insights from your discussion and record them in the notes section of your personal imapMyTeam page next time you login.

Authentic relationships don’t just happen, they require intentional cultivation. 

Angst for the Memories

Our title is a play on the name of Bob Hope’s signature tune- ‘Thanks for the Memories’ – which he always sang to close out his act. The lyrics tell a story of two people’s interconnected lives with one favorably reminiscing over the great times they had together.

Have you thought about how your coworkers will remember you? Will they be inclined to ‘thank you’ for the memories of working together or might it be ‘angst’?

People that we interact with experience us in one of two ways; when we are at our best, through our usual behavior or when we are less than our best, through our stress behavior.

Our usual behavior is the source of our strengths and is also adaptable so we can manage ourselves to be more effective with others. Our stress behavior is our frustrated behavior and is a transformation from under control productive behavior to out of control counterproductive behavior. Our teammates and colleagues typically do not care for us much when we are this way.

While it may be obvious, if we operate from our stress mode much of the time, we can create angst for others. It’s also true that if we inappropriately or over-use our strengths we may inadvertently cause angst to others.

You can use the grid based strengths and stress points found in your “Team Player” report at www.imapMyTeam to point out the differences. The grid will provide insight on how to effectively use your strengths as well as ways to mitigate the impact of your stress behavior.


Armed with self-awareness of your stress behaviors and the discipline to effectively use your strengths, you’ll not only be productive but likely ensure others will remember you with “thanks” rather than “angst.”

Change itself doesn’t cause stress…what stresses me is HOW the change affects ME

You may not be able to control the changes coming your way, but you can learn to respond in a way that minimizes the stress that threatens your productivity.

At the risk of oversimplification, how change personally impacts us is fairly predictable. When change is aligned with our own internal motivational needs we embrace it quickly and effortlessly. In these cases the change does not seem to be too ‘big’, ‘radical’ or threatening - we adjust to it fairly easily.

However when the change is not aligned with our motivational needs the change, no matter how ‘small’ or ‘simple’ will cause us to take immediate notice. That change has now fundamentally disrupted the conditions that contribute to our success and we may react adversely and be on the cusp of, if not fully engaged in, unproductive behaviors.

If the changes push us too far from our motivational need our poor reaction to the change may heighten to the point it will impede our ability to succeed. In other words we have exceeded the ‘optimum’ level of stress and rather than engaged and challenged we’re stressed!

In the pull down menu in the center section of www.imapmyteam.com® we’ve added a new report titled “ When Change Stresses You”. This report will help you understand how change that disrupts a basic motivational need may trigger a stress reaction from you. The report also includes a prescriptive tip that will help you neutralize that stress reaction.


Change in the workplace is unavoidable; through understanding and use of the When Change Stresses You report, change that disrupts your performance is.

Planning for Success = (R+B) +(Y+G)

Defining success is an important first step in understanding what it might take to get there. Once you’ve spent some time getting clarity around what success looks like for you, your team, your program, it’s time for a plan.

It is always good to understand how each member of your team contributes to the planning process. To understand your team, please run the Team Dynamics Report and refer to the strengths page.

The opposite quadrants bring the greatest difference to the planning process. They tend to look at the situation very differently and their strengths, while contrasting, are complimentary.

Let’s look at how the Red-Blue strengths can complement each other:

The red quadrant brings speed to the process. A red plan is all about being decisive and moving decisions to action quickly. The emphasis of people in this quadrant is on the tasks that make up the plan.

The blue quadrant brings direction to the process. A blue plans by taking time to think through complexity, and making sure we are confident in our direction before we begin to take action. Their emphasis is on the impact and consequences of the plan.

Let’s look at how the Yellow-Green opposite strengths can complement each other:

The green quadrant brings flexibility and conviction to the process. A green plan may focus on being responsive and changing quickly to meet shifting business circumstances and being assertive in doing so. Their emphasis is on flexibility in managing key relationships.

The yellow quadrant brings focus and accountability to the process. A Yellow plan is about staying the course with the process and established plans, giving them time to work. The emphasis of people in the yellow quadrant is on the details that lead to a successful implementation of the plan.

As you consider your goals or how you can best contribute to an established strategy, looking to your proven strengths is a great way to get a solid start in arriving at your final destination. Even better, is to understand how each member of your team contributes to the plan and then use those strengths.

Go to www.imapmyteam.com ® for a guide to using the strengths of each of the quadrants to help you develop your well-rounded implementation plan.

Standing In? – Then Stand Out!

The businesses that get ahead are the ones that who get things done.

 

In order to get things done as a team, you have to all be on the same page and heading in the same direction. And to be on the same page you need open and consistent communication – so what happens when there is a schedule conflict and competing meetings are tugging at key participants?

You get asked to sit-in for someone at the meeting! When is the last time you have been asked to stand in for your boss at an important meeting or series of meetings?  Are you prepared – not just with proper content - but knowledge of key behavioral traits for all the participants?

Perhaps you have just been assigned a new role that will require you to meet with others in the organization you really don’t know very well.  Maybe you are currently participating in a meeting where after a meeting or two you just do not feel like you are ‘clicking’ with one or two others as well as you’d like.

www.imapMyTeam.com allows you to customize your home page by adding groups to your “My Meetings” space.  Simply click on the “create meeting” link to get started by naming and describing your meeting. Once you’ve labeled your new meeting, you have the option to go ahead and “create the meeting” or “create and add members” in one step.  When you “create and add members” a pull down window appears with names you can highlight and select to add to your meeting.  As participants are added or fall off of your meeting roster you can edit imapMyTeam accordingly.

With imapMyTeam at your fingertips, you have the ability to participate in unfamiliar meeting territory with confidence.  

 Fail No More

“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.” This famous line from the 1967 movie “Cool Hand Luke”, starring Paul Newman, appropriately portrays the unfortunate point that often, despite their best efforts, people are ineffective in communication.  While communication about almost anything is always important, it may never be more critical than when it comes to communicating change.

Not many days go by without organizations making some change. Big changes, like reorganization, tend to get our attention because of their sweeping impact on so many people. However regular tweaks to either process or procedure are a common part of revamping and reorganizing workplace tasks, goals and initiatives.

Perhaps more important than the actual procedural and process changes is the ability to communicate the changes to all employees. Communicating changes effectively will help keep everyone on the same page while meeting evolving company goals and initiatives.

There is a new report in imapMyTeam that will help you create a strategy to effectively communicate the change to anyone on your team.  Remember, we all have different filters when hearing about a change and this new report helps you anticipate the best way to position change for each person.   No more failure to communicate!

In www.imapmyteam.com ® there is a report titled: Strategies to Properly Position Change. This report is written to help you understand how to communicate change effectively to the person that you have chosen to run this report for.

How to Resolve Disagreement in the Workplace

Disagreement happens; even on the most cohesive teams. While healthy disagreement often helps a team move forward, failure to effectively address and resolve disagreement is a real threat to the ability of the team to be successful.

The consequences of unresolved disagreement are often lack of trust, hurt feelings, outbursts of anger, little focus and ultimately the inability to work together. It can create tension, become counter-productive and destroy teams.

Tension created by conflict and disagreement is not always negative.  It’s sometimes neutral or even positive. Just because two people disagree doesn’t mean their disagreement is negative or poisonous; it can simply be a difference of opinion. However, left unaddressed and allowed to fester and grow, that neutral tension can become negative and possibly harmful.

Understanding that the process of resolving disagreement is not a contest to be won or lost is an important first step in learning to turn negative conflict into positive tension.  This will help you and others to be more effective as you navigate those areas of disagreement.

imapMyTeam will guide you to the steps you can take to quickly and effectively resolve disagreements.

In the center pane pull down menu of www.imapmyteam.com ® there is a report titled: Resolving Disagreements. This report helps you understand why working through disagreement can be so difficult and provides some helpful suggestions.

Run this report on yourself and consider one or two things you can do differently to manage the tension of conflict before it becomes counter-productive to winning as a team

Trust at a Distance

Do you really understand the person on the other side of the WebEx, Skype, conference call, webcam who you don’t spend much face time with? In today’s increasingly global, virtual work environment we work more and more with people not physically located with us.

We all make judgments, evaluations and assumptions about the situations around us and the actions of others. We put what we see or hear through our own mental and perceptual filters and make decisions. And those decisions lead us to trust (or not trust) others.

That can be really difficult without the benefit of spending time with a person to know and understand them. If your organization is doing more than ever with less, time is a precious resource – so as a result we often assemble teams or swap out team members and put them to work straightaway.

Whoops. We forgot to take some time [there is that word again] to glue everyone together, so to speak. Trust is the glue. Trust typically takes time.

Trust is important in organizations. Few factors can change so many things toward the positive or negative as much as or as quickly as the presence, or absence, of trust.  Our trust encounters are not just limited to direct, face to face encounters –remember it is determined at a distance as well.

imapMyTeam is a great tool to build trust in critical relationships. In fact, there is a series of three trust reports available and they make a great starting point to understand how you build trust, what you need to maintain it, and what happens if trust is fractured. Login at www.imapMyTeam.com  and look for these three reports in the ‘Reports about You’ section of the center pane

Everyone wins as trust grows.

 Be more than 54%

According to a recent study done by The Ken Blanchard Company 54% of managers use just one style to direct and support their employees.

The amount of direction and support people receive directly impacts the efficiency and quality of their work. Because we know that relationships are critical to success and that people have very different motivational needs 54% just will not get you to the success you require.

It is important to recognize your own default settings. If you have been using imapMyTeam effectively you will be aware that you have a ‘default’ setting when it comes to leadership. You are also aware that you can make a decision to do things differently than that default mode. However, when the pressure to perform is elevated the way you relate, communicate, direct, delegate, coach, support, etc. can easily return to the default mode because it feels natural and comes easily to you.

Any style is great if it is a match for what a direct report needs. Each is also a hindrance if it is the wrong style for the situation.

What to do?

Stretch your boundaries expand your repertoire, learn to develop and use strengths that are ‘uncomfortable’ but effective because they support someone on the team. Review the Coaching report in imapMyTeam for each of your direct reports. Better yet, schedule a meeting with each of your directs to discuss the coaching page. Do you provide this type of support? Is it natural or is it a stretch for your default behavior? If it is a stretch, practice it and it will not feel as hard the next time – and it will make you and your direct report more effective.

Your goal is to do better than the 54% who can only do it one way!

Are you Meeting the Needs of the Meeting?

Almost everyone has a complaint about meetings.

Some are legitimate, some are not. Meetings are important, but it IS hard to plan and conduct them in a manner that meets all of the participant’s expectations. Go too ‘fast’ – some people will think you are not giving important topics the time they require. Go too ‘slow’ – some people think you are wasting time that could be used elsewhere.

What is the balance?

Popular opinion is that meetings are one of the least productive business activities . But if you are running an effective meeting and you are keeping each of the participants fully involved and engaged you can have a very positive impact on what gets done – that just might trickle down to your bottom line.

The first step in improving the efficiency of your meetings is to recognize that meetings are a collaborative effort and all of the attendees come to the meeting with certain expectations. When those expectations are consistently unmet the attendee will begin to slip into unproductive behaviors and disrupt the meeting.

You can consider this behavior to be a warning shot to get your attention – and a chance to course correct. As you already understand from other imapMyTeam reports there is a direct correlation between unmet needs and the resulting reactive behavior. If you see any of the behaviors described in the Slow Down the Meeting report – there is a reason why and a chance to fix it before your meeting is the topic of the next ‘water cooler meeting’.

In Relationships 10=45

Yes you read that title correctly, our math is not off at all; in fact it is spot on.

There is a mathematical formula to determine the exact number of unique relationships in a group [or family, etc.]  When you plug 10 into that equation you get 45. Plug 15 in and you get 105. The higher the number, the greater your chances of getting it wrong with somebody!

So if you are on a team of 10 people it takes a lot of time – which remains a constant and is often scarce in our hectic business lives- to sort through all of that complexity and nuance.

imapMyTeam is a time saver. Whether you need tips to communicate, influence, motivate, inspire, coach or just plain understand what might be going on with someone there is no faster way to get there.

 Do yourself a favor, put a post it note on your laptop, tablet, screen and on it write “remember, IMT will save me time” and when you are ‘too busy’ or ‘too stressed’ or whatever ‘too’ you might be, and that ‘too’ involves a critical relationship, use that post-it as a reminder to open up imapMyTeam at www.imapMyTeam.com, log-in and get the answers you’re looking for.

We think whatever ‘too’ affliction you had previously will be converted to a ‘too bad’ I didn’t use this resource sooner – I could have saved a lot of time. Time remains the same; 60 minutes to the hour; imapMyTeam helps you to use it wisely.

Align your ‘Stars’

Teams have a mission and purpose that is well defined and each individual on the team has a role designed to contribute to that purpose.

 However the pace of change that most teams experience is accelerating and whether you are the team lead or an individual contributor, it is good to make time to access how well you and/or the team is standing up to the changes that impact mission and purpose.

www.imapMyTeam.com  will help you understand the unique characteristics of your team that contribute to individual and team success.  Take a minute to access your team grid found in the upper right area of your ImapMyTeam home page.

If you are a leader and responsible for others, look at the placement of your team for each of the symbols and consider:

• Interests:  Do the roles and responsibilities assigned to individuals on my team seem to be a good fit? What can I do to ensure assignments are appealing and met with enthusiasm?
• Strengths:  Does my team have the diversity of strengths needed to achieve our goals?
• Needs:  Am I providing the support the team needs to do their best work?
• Stress:  Do I recognize and respond effectively when my team is under stress?

As a team member, look at where your symbols are positioned on the grid for perspective on how you best work and interact with others on the team and consider:

• Interests:  Do my work assignments easily hold my interest and inspire me?
• Strengths:  What strengths might I work to add to be more effective, in more situations?
• Needs:  How can I ensure the support I need to do my best work is available to me when I need it most?
• Stress:  When I sense I’m losing control under stress, am I able to recognize it and self-manage myself out of it?

Revisiting and answering these questions will help put the team in great position to align its ‘stars’ and meet your ongoing business challenges 

People are complex. Fortunately you have a solution that is not.

Simple, crystal clear insights to understand and to be understood are at your fingertips on  imapMyTeam.com

            

If you haven’t yet explored imapMyTeam, it’s time to learn what others already know.   Click on this link www.imapMyTeam.com, enter your email address and password – and you have access to an extraordinary tool.  You can become an expert in getting the best out of yourself and those you work with.  If you’ve forgotten your password, click on “forgot it?” to get a new one.

Many of the reports in imapMyTeam are designed to help your manager and colleagues learn how to help you succeed by giving them the ‘behind the scenes’ look at the real you.

If you only have 15 minutes, the 5 reports listed below represent a wealth of essential information.

How to talk to you

Coaching Tips

How to Reward for Best Performance

How to Inspire for Best Performance

What to avoid with you  

imapMyTeam is your individual ticket to not just being yourself, but being your best self when it counts most.  With imapMyTeam you and others get a clear picture, with specific language, about what you need to do your very best work.

The Correct Pressure Improves the Ride

Anyone who has ever ridden a bike, driven a car, or operated anything with pneumatic tires is fully aware that you need the correct (air) pressure for optimal performance.
Over or under inflated tires wear out faster than those with the ‘proper’ pressure. At work, we also perform poorly if we have too much or too little pressure (although we are more complex than a tire). It is a fact that being under intense pressure over an extended period of time results in unproductive stress behavior.

We can help prevent those nasty ‘blowouts.’

Using imapMyTeam® helps you recognize and understand your reactions to pressure. When you are completely self-aware of what signals the transition from being “in control” of your actions to “out of control” you can begin to limit the negative impact of pressure on your relationships.

One of the most important, if not the most important, relationships you have at work is the one with your manager. Use the drop-down window in the center pane at www.imapmyteam.com and run the report titled: Your Style With Your Manager. Focus on the second section of the report ‘If you are not at your best with your manager’.


Set up a quick 10 minute meeting with your manager to share and discuss the report. Chances are good that the ride from here on out, while at times still tough, will get smoother in many ways. 

How Do You Define Pressure?

Regardless of the type of work you are doing, encountering pressure along the way is to be expected. 

So is pressure a good thing?

In a recent article, Right Management sites the parallel between organizational and individual pressure using the “Stretch and Strain” curve (depicted below this post). The model measures the correlation of low to high performance with low to high pressure. 

The two extremes represent low performance/pressure, producing boredom; and high performance/pressure, producing panic. Productivity suffers at the extremes. 

However, the zone noting a steady increase in pressure to slightly above the midpoint also represents an increase in performance and the “comfort zone”. The next more tightly placed zones are the “stretch and strain” phases where productivity peaks briefly at their intersection and trails off steeply into the final zone of panic.

   

This model is a good illustration of how pressure can be a positive influence on individual and organizational performance as well as individual engagement and satisfaction.  It also serves as a warning of the danger of the unchecked extremes. 

It Takes Pressure to Make Diamonds

In today’s work environment it is not a question of whether you will be under pressure, but how often and how intense. If you can't learn to perform well under when you are under some measure of pressure, then you probably can't perform well... at all.

One obstacle in dealing effectively with workplace pressure and the stress it creates is that it is often hard for people to identify the precisely what is happening to them- other than knowing they have a general feeling of ‘being stressed’. 

To accurately identify the root cause of your stress and what triggers it means you can take steps to course-correct to manage your way out of this counterproductive behavior.

Introducing the ‘Perform Under Pressure’ Report

A new report has been added to IMT to help you understand how your behavior changes when there is a clash of your expectations and the interaction you experience with another coworker or the conditions you experience in the work environment.  

People who are great performers under pressure put a lot of work into it. Use this report effectively and you too will become great under pressure.

Product Enhancement Announcement

imapMyTeam® is pleased to introduce a new report..

“How to Succeed Under Pressure”

This report is designed to assist you in understanding behaviors that may impact your ability to succeed and what to do about it.

It is available in the center pane section under the 'reports about you' drop down menu.

Managing your Energy is the Key to High Performance

The topic of the three previous March Tuesday Tips has been pace.
How your strengths contribute to the pace at which you work, what you need to maintain pace and how your stress might impact the ability to keep up the pace.

Given the demands of today’s business environment we all tend to get moving rather quickly and ‘race’ through the day – often faster than we’d like; meeting to meeting, phone call to phone call, deadline to deadline.

The number of hours in a day are fixed, but the quantity and quality of our energy is not. In many ways our energy is a precious resource we need to responsibly manage. No one else is going to do it for you.

We have far more control over our energy than we often realize. Sometimes in an effort to ‘keep up with the pace’ we sacrifice the very things critical to recharging ourselves and giving us back the energy we need to be productive.

We all need different ways to recharge and get re-energized. The “What you should do to re-energize” report at www.imapMyTeam.com, helps you do just that!

When you sense it’s time to take charge of your energy reserves review the report and take an energy audit. Are you doing these types of things for yourself? If not, chances are your running dangerously close to empty. If that needle is pointing to the “E” you owe it to yourself to incorporate some of the suggestions into your day as soon as you can. You will feel better! 

How to Keep Up the Pace

The triathlon is a grueling and intense test of human endurance. To be a successful triathlete, you not only have to train hard, but you have to train smart. A training regimen really pays off when race day challenges threaten to knock you off your pace – and until race day a triathlete never knows what kind of elements he will compete in and need to deal with.

Just like those competitors on race day, the stress of business threatens to knock us off our pace despite our training. When we know in advance how we react under personal stress we can minimize its impact on our performance over the long haul.

imapMyTeam® will help you identify how you may respond when under stress.

In the center pane pull down menu of www.imapmyteam.com Look for your: My Team Player Report and click on the section for stress. Click “next” at the introduction screen and click on the square symbol for the “stress” grid. Work your way to the description of your reactive traits that may force you to speed up or slow down, and develop a strategy to mitigate their impact.

Learn to recognize and manage your stress points. It will pay big dividends in your ability to sustain your pace and demonstrate endurance for the long term.

How to Understand the Role of Pace in Business; Part 2

United Parcel Service (UPS) ran a very successful marketing and ad campaign several years ago using the slogan “UPS, moving at the speed of business”.

The phrase “moving at the speed of business” seems to imply speed and things moving at a quick, brisk pace. Yet the campaign is not simply about speed, but about being committed to on time delivery according to the needs of your business.

What kind of delivery schedule does your work or customer require, same day, two day, next week, or even next year? You may find the answer is “all of the above”

Last week we learned how the strengths you rely on most, help you or hurt you in delivering on commitments. When we combine this with considering what your client really needs, it helps you to work at the pace most appropriate for you are responsible for. Responding/managing to what the client really needs allows you to manage “urgency”. Getting the “urgency” factor right helps you be more productive and work at the speed of your business.

imapMyTeam® will help you recognize the appropriate pace others may expect.

In the center pane pull down menu of www.imapmyteam.com. Look for your: My Team Player Report and click on the section over needs. Click “next” at the introduction screen and click on the circle symbol for the “support you need” grid. As you consider the attributes for yourself, roll over the other quadrants to see insights about what others that are different than you need in the way of response or support and how they may impact your pace. 

How You Set the Pace for the Program

The very first pace car in motorsports was introduced during the inaugural Indy 500, in 1911. Most people are familiar with the pace car duty of leading the pack of race cars in a parade formation, gradually building speed and allowing for a “flying start” to the race. Another more serious deployment of the pace car is as a warning for debris, collisions and/or weather. The pace car in this role becomes more of a “safety car” geared to ensure a safe speed under adverse track conditions.

One of the important roles you play in leading others is very similar to the pace car example. Leaders are out in front ensuring their people and projects get off to “flying starts” and team members also depend on the leader to be out in front warning of potential debris and hazards that can be damaging.

imapMyTeam® will help you better understand your personal pace and how you may be “pacing” your colleagues and team members.

In the center pane pull down menu of www.imapmyteam.com there is a report titled: Team Player Strengths. This report helps you understand your usual behavior and the strengths you have learned to gain success.

Run the Team Player Strengths report on yourself and look for key attributes that impact your pace. Consider one or two things you can do differently to help you lead appropriately from the front of the pack.

Be a Trusted Business Partner

Trust provides the platform for building effective and lasting business partnerships that are the foundation for success. When you and your colleagues trust each other, it allows you to tap into the power of your combined skills and knowledge, easily collaborate on common goals, and stay energized to do your very best work.

When present, trust enables everyone on a team to operate with a high level of energy. When trust is missing, energy is quickly drained from people and teams and common goals turn into personal ones.

Your imapMyTeam Trust report will help you understand three important aspects of trust:

• How you build trust with others
• What you need from others to gain and maintain their trust and confidence and,
• How stress will impact or change your behavior which could lead to a lack of trust

In the center pane pull down menu of www.imapmyteam.com ® you will find the “Trust” Report.  Read this report and apply the insights for yourself and your colleagues.  As you look through the reports, look for insight into how others may be different from you. These insights will enable you to more quickly establish trust where it’s critically needed.

The more you commit to building trust with others, the more you will understand why organizational consultant and author Warren Bennis once said. “Trust is the lubrication that makes it possible for organizations to work.”

Product Enhancement Announcement

imapMyTeam® is pleased to introduce a new report that is scheduled for release in February 2013.

“Assessing Personal Risk in the Plan”

This report is designed to assist you in learning where you may experience personal pitfalls when evaluating your role in a larger plan.